392: Steve Jobs Email, Buffett, Lithium, U.S. Red Tape, Artefact, François Rochon, Alzheimer's & Obesity, and Airpods vs Marvel

"flip the bird to your impostor syndrome"

To learn is to be young, however old. —Aeschylus

🥸 I suffer from impostor syndrome.

But it’s nothing special, it’s very common.

If you look for them, you can find prospective reasons why you may not be good enough for X or don’t deserve Y or can’t compare with people who have credentials or experience in Z…

But you know what? Over the years I’ve learned to deal with it.

How?

Not by stopping having impostor syndrome in the first place.

Over time, I’ve just learned to tell it to go F🤬k itself.

It’s *not a useful feeling*, nothing good comes from it, and it can only make things worse, so F🤬k it.

Do that long enough, and you almost don’t even notice it’s there. When it pops up, you kind of just shrug and keep going.

If courage is doing something despite being afraid (not the absence of fear), then to do anything new that stretches your capabilities (and thus is uncertain), you have to learn to go for it despite doubt and flip the bird to your impostor syndrome. 🖕🐧

💻 Two weeks ago in edition #385, I wrote about changing my default search engine to Bing to better test it out (“you can’t judge a search engine by doing a handful of random searches in it, you have to live with it for a few weeks and put some real mileage on it”).

Well, I have now switched back to DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine.

I use it for most of my navigational searches (~75% of ‘em), and for that, it does the job perfectly — it’s fast, uncluttered, has a dark background mode, and you can even turn off the ads in the settings — and for the more complex searches, I append “!g” to my DuckDuckGo search and it does a Google search instead.

I found Bing to be faster than I remembered, but it’s generally more cluttered than DDG or Google and the results appear the be worse on average than Google and maybe even DDG (though I’m not sure). I think they have improved result quality vs the last time I did a longer trial a few years ago, though.

The new Chatbot features are neat, but for now, I tend to keep searches and LLM queries separate, so I rarely stumble into an LLM when I thought I was going to do a traditional search.

If I want to ask something that I think an LLM would do better, I’ll go directly to ChatGPT, Bing’s chat section, or use Bearly.AI (🐻 — which uses GPT-3.5 and can be triggered by a key combo from anywhere, even outside the browser).

🛀💭👨‍👦‍👦 My kids, like all kids, are obsessed and fascinated by a lot of stuff they’ve seen in video games, TV shows, books, etc.

How often have I heard about the Master Sword from Zelda? Or enchanted diamond armors and Ender Dragons from Minecraft?

Listening to them talk sometimes reminds me of how much mindspace certain things used to occupy in my brain when I was a kid, and now they don’t. 🧠🚂

For example, as a kid, the idea of ‘secret passages’ was a really big thing. I thought about them all the time!

Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a secret trapdoor here?

In this video game, make sure to look around to find secrets…

Oh wow, this movie had a cool hidden tunnel underneath the house…

But these days, I rarely ever think about secret doors and passageways and such…

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Makes me wonder, what else has faded like that without me noticing too much 🤔

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🏦 💰 Liberty Capital 💳 💴

🍎 Steve Jobs: “I love and admire my species, living and dead…” ✍️

This email to himself comes from The Steve Jobs Archive.